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Night at the Museum

Half a million eyes peer out from behind thick glass jars. They seem to follow
me as I move down rows of metal shelves, stacked floor to ceiling with specimens.

On one corner, right at chin height, a lungfish sits. Pickled in alcohol,
it resembles a human organ, and I think of the actor Steve Martin in the movie,
“The Man with Two Brains.” I pick up the jar. The lungfish bobs up and down
as I turn the container to get a better look. It has small pectoral fins and
gill covers that look like wrinkles. It peers back at me with glassy dime-sized
eyes. The fluorescent lights flicker and my imagination runs. I hope that the
power stays on.

There are more that 250,000 specimens in Oregon State University’s Ichthyology
Collection, representing 2,500 different species of fish, one of the world’s
premier collections of freshwater fish local to the Pacific Northwest. It’s
also a little creepy. The collection is being updated by its most recent curator,
Brian , an assistant professor in the College of Agricultural Sciences.

“These specimens, and the additional genetic material stored in freezers
here, are part of a global library of biodiversity continually updated by scientists
and researchers in institutions around the world,” says Sidlauskas as he hands
me a pint-sized jar holding a Chinook salmon smolt. Special enzymes have been
added to the alcohol solution, and instead of seeing the fish as a solid pickled
creature, I see the cartilage that would have matured into bone to form a skeleton.
It’s like looking at a 3-D X-ray.

“Trained researchers can use the collection to understand the evolution and
morphology of a specific fish from a specific location,” says Sidlauskas. “These
tools help us better understand life history and development, population shifts,
and changes that may have affected habitat and food availability. We can learn
about the fish, and also about the ecosystem in which the fish lived.”

Much like how an inter-library loan program functions, researchers at OSU
and other institutions can check out samples from the collection for their
own work and purposes. In addition to the fish collection, OSU also has extensive
collections of plants, seeds, reptiles, and insects. “We are the biodiversity
library for the region,” says Sidlauskas.

OSU fish museum curator and fisheries researcher Brian Sidlauskas examines a toothed headstander, one of some 250,000 specimens in the museum.

The OSU fish collection was started in the late 1930s and has had only two
other curators since then. In addition to its extensive samples of regional
fish, it holds material from around the globe, and continually adds new specimens.
Sidlauskas recently returned from collecting trips in South America where he
discovered, and brought back to OSU, two previously unidentified species of
the fish genus Leporinus.

“There are currently about 31,000 species of fish known in the world, and
their number continues to grow,” says Sidlauskas, who will travel this winter
to Guyana with funding from the Smithsonian to collect fish in a river system
that has never before been sampled. “There is roughly one new species of freshwater
fish being discovered each day, most of them in the tropics. In terms of biodiversity,
freshwater fish comprise about one quarter of all known vertebrates.”

The College of Agricultural Sciences is funding a complete makeover of the
Ichthyology Collection. Records are being digitized into a searchable database,
and the largest specimens are being transferred into archival-quality stainless
steel tanks.

The tanks will ensure the collection of salmon, sturgeons, suckers, and others
will be preserved in perpetuity, says Sidlauskas. The tanks will also shutter
the fish from view, closing the lids of unseeing eyes. I walk one more time
down the rows of glass jars, not sure how I feel about that. As long as the
lights stay on, creepy is good for the imagination.